A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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On May 11, the Department of Health & Human Services finalized rules requiring insurers to tell any of their customers who get premium rebates this summer that the windfall comes courtesy of Obamacare. Here’s the official required language: “This letter is to inform you that you will receive a rebate of a portion of your health insurance premiums. This rebate is required by the Affordable Care Act-the health reform law.”

Given that Obamacare is already increasing costs for most patients – insured or otherwise – I wonder who the lucky few will be who get a chance to read the government’s prose. Moreover, it’s a bit rich to create this “language mandate” when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had earlier advised insurance companies not to speak against Obamacare’s cost-increasing features. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Hans Bader put it:

Obama’s HHS secretary sought to gag insurers that disclosed how Obamacare’s mandates are increasing the cost of health insurance, even though such speech is clearly protected by the First Amendment, telling them if they did so, they could be excluded from health insurance exchanges. Prior to that, the Obama administration attempted to gag insurers from disclosing how Obamacare harms Medicare Advantage participants, drawing criticism from First Amendment experts like UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, the author of two First Amendment textbooks.

Beyond the unseemliness of it all, however, there’s also a constitutional problem: The government can’t require people to make politicized statements, whether that’s “Live Free or Die” on license plate or the labeling of consumer products where the labels aren’t justified on fraud-prevention or public health grounds. See some other examples and legal analysis in Bader’s post at CEI’s blog.

The bottom line is that just like the First Amendment stops the government from censoring speech, it stops it from forcing speech. And just like there’s no “health care is unique” exception to the Commerce Clause, there isn’t one to the First Amendment.

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post:

“GOP stalls on insurance marketplaces” [May 12] reports that “the conservative firm Leavitt Partners…is working with a number of states on their plans” to create the government bureaucracies that the new health care law calls insurance “exchanges.”

The article should have informed readers that this “conservative firm” (whatever that means) is a for-profit government contractor that makes money by helping states create those exchanges, and is acting against the advice of the nation’s leading conservative think tank. The Heritage Foundation counsels states not to create exchanges, and to send all related funds back to Washington.

Finally, the article claims states can avoid a “federal takeover” by creating an exchange. On the contrary, the law requires state-run exchanges to obey all federal edicts, just as a federal exchange would. The federal takeover has already happened. States that create their own exchanges merely pay for the privilege of losing their sovereignty.

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the New York Times:

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) created a new ObamaCare “exchange” by executive order, it was indeed “A Deft Health Care Move” [Apr. 18].

Really, what was he supposed to do? Let legislators decide whether to commit taxpayers to such an expense? (They had declined.) Sit back and let the federal government pay for its own Exchange? (That was the alternative.) Block a $3,000-per-worker tax on employers? (Had Cuomo done nothing, New York employers would have been exempt from ObamaCare’s “employer mandate.”)

Cuomo brilliantly and single-handedly volunteered New Yorkers to pay for a new government bureaucracy and burdened New York employers with a new, job-killing tax. Who needs a legislature!

Suppose the IRS assesses me a $1,000 penalty for failing to obtain health insurance. It is true that the law prohibits the IRS from using liens or incarceration to collect that $1,000. But, money being fungible, the IRS may simply deem my first $1,000 of income-tax withholding to be payment of that penalty. As a result, I would owe an additional $1,000 in income tax at the end of the year, and the IRS could come after me with every tool at its disposal, including liens and incarceration.

Two articles in the Washington Post sparked these two poor, unsuccessful letters to the editor. First this:

I’m no Republican, but “‘Innovation advisers’ chosen for ideas to improve health care, cut costs” [Jan. 21] gives short shrift to those who oppose the new health care law’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation when it reports, “Some Republicans have questioned the value of investing in experimentation to produce results at a time of limited resources.”

If some critic of the law actually said, “Resource limitations prevent us from investing in innovations that stretch resources further,” please do print it. I could use the laugh. But that’s not why critics oppose the Center.

The argument against the health care law’s efforts to promote innovation is that they won’t work. The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that out of dozens of supposed Medicare innovations, only one met its goal of saving taxpayers money. That pilot program ended 16 years ago. Medicare has yet to adopt it program-wide.

This is an important debate. Readers deserve to hear both sides, not caricatures.

Government is not more innovative than private health insurance. It was private health plans that developed important innovations like prepayment, bundled payments, pay-for-performance, and penalties for medical errors. Government adoption typically lags private insurers by decades. In the rare instance where Medicare successfully tests an innovation (read: bundled payments for heart bypass surgery), it goes nowhere. If Thomas Edison had to submit his innovations to Medicare, you would be reading this by candlelight.

We don’t need more pilot programs to tell us that Medicare blocks innovation. What we need is a little skepticism when presented with the latest Bureau of Government Efficiency.